Santa Barbara Area Surf Reports

Comments:

For the next 9 months I'm going to be a Central Coast weekend warrior as I'm up with K-dog as she tucks into her 2nd of 2 years of grad school at Cal Poly. I've only surfed a few places North of Point Conception so it's time to start exploring. Today's exploration I surfed near some big rock. I made the mistake of surfing a new place on a new board. I just pulled the trigger on a used 6'6" with an extra 1/8" of thickness and 1/4" of width in an effort to manage the ruggedness of the Central Coast. Of course trying to wire a new board in a new wave is a little tough. That is, you don't know weather to blame the board or the wave when you bail.

Another reality of this central coast existence is cold water. From springsuiting it in sunny Santa Barbara to putting on the 3/2 in foggy central coast and still being cold, it's a shock. Tomorrow it's time to dust off the booties. By November I better pull the trigger on a 4/3. Then a hood. Maybe some gloves. God no, not gloves.

The positive aspect is that there were waves. I'm not even sure I need to methodically check the buoys and predict where and when it's going to be good. I'm just going to drag my board down to the beach and head out and I'll get something. This place was way more crowded then I thought it would be, it must have been a small day. The pack closest to the rock was all longboarders and the pack I hung out 100 yards down was shortboarders. It was a nice co-existence, until some guy with 20 square feet of track top on his longboard decided to park it outside and catch every single wave.

My best wave was a nice chest high left that was reeling. I looked before taking off and the wave hog was about to take off way down the line, about two sections and 100 feet away. So I forgot my "I'm the outsider I should respect the locals" mentality and dropped in figuring he'd never make it through those sections. He hollered instantly and just out of spite powered through hundreds of feet of whitewater just to get to where I was, peacefully railgrabbing down the line of a pitching out section. I don't think I'll pull that move when I explore some of those "don't surf here unless you have puncture resistant tyres" spots.